My fiancée dragged me kicking and screaming to Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut Lady Bird. The trailer, which presents the film as 90 minutes of an angsty high school girl fighting with her mother, did not incite me to rush to my local theater. Yet after the film review website Rotten Tomatoes announced last Monday that Lady Bird had broken its all-time record for consecutive positive reviews, I put prejudices aside.
Within minutes, one sees the acting is stellar. Laurie Metcalf and Saoirse Ronan, in particular, as mother Marion and daughter Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson, turn in magnificent performances. But credit goes to writer and director Greta Gerwig for subverting the audience’s saccharine expectations at every turn. Gerwig offers a brutally honest vision of humanity and transcendence, avoiding sentimentality with masterful precision — a Herculean accomplishment in a film about a suburban teenage girl who struggles with identity, romance, family, and faith. The movie’s honesty derives from its meticulous specificity: robust characters, all with their own vivid inner lives, try with all of their might to be the ‘best version of themselves’ amidst the myriad particularities of Sacramento in 2002. Nevertheless, no character escapes his own foibles, and the inevitable suffering and regret that follow disquiet the audience’s comfortable illusions of our own identities and relationships.
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